TacomaTurf: Member Guest 2012

Here's a nice picture of the putting green area as we set up for this years Member Guest Invitational (MGI). Thanks to our sponsor BMW Northwest for the beautiful cars on display. From my perspective, this year we had the perfect scenario for providing the best conditions possible. That is a week ago we had over half an inch of rain, and then from that day till today, we had temps in the low to mid 70's. The mild temperatures has allowed us to get the course extremely firm while not stressing any turf.

Do you remember several months ago when I showed the neat sensors being installed in the root zone of some of our putting greens? Well those sensors really helped out this week as we controlled the dry down from last weeks rainfall. Check out the data we were looking at this week coming from the sensor on the 18th green.

This graph shows the moisture in the green 1 inch below the surface over the past 8 days. Each line is a different day. The time of day is along the bottom axis and the moisture content is along the side axis. The actual values aren't as important as noticing that each day the line gets lower and lower as it dries out. The values are important to me however since I know if I get below 20%, the potential to loose grass is very high and from a playability standpoint, the firmness would get so that the greens become unplayable given the speeds are averaging over 13' on the stimpmeter. So what I was trying to do this week was allow the greens to dry out, and firm up, but not go past the "fun" factor. The next picture zooms in so you can see a little better.

The top line was the day after the half inch of rain. The bottom line is the last day of the MGI. The bottom line stops because I'm looking at this at 6 am and the day has just begun. So at 6 am, we are at 23%. Notice each day from the rain event we dried out about 1.5%. So I adjusted our watering times to keep the dry down in slow increments so that the greens became ever increasingly firmer. Using the data here allowed me to control the dry down so that the last day of the event we got right up to 21% which is really firm but not so firm that the greens would be unplayable. This next chart is another way of looking at the data.

Now the days are along the bottom axis. You can see the left arrow is pointing at a spike in the graph. That is the day we had the rain event. Then you can see as the days go on, the greens dryed out quickly. The arrow on the right shows that the drying down was interrupted. That was the monday before the MGI. The reason for the increase in moisture is because I watered in an application I made to the greens. The application was wetting agents and iron. All I wanted to do was put something on the greens that would make them look awesome without making them grow. It worked well. The greens looked great all week. All I can say is these sensors are really neat and they have been very helpful with managing the greens this summer, and they were instrumental in making the conditions for the MGI the best ever. Another great tool for us turf managers. Just for fun, check out some pictures I took from this years MGI

BMW's are gorgeous!

Pyramids and Beemers on the range tee is really cool.

With the cool temperatures, we literally watered the whole course by hand with virtually no help from the sprinklers.

Mowing greens at sunset is fun

The Beemers had to be moved off and on the course each day. That means we got to drive them. Rough job huh?

The long drive competition was a blast. Brock just pasted this shot.

With the new teeways, we took the opportunity to play the 10th hole from a spot that has never been played from in over 100 years...................(I'm guessing)